A new Snapdragon series processor will arrive from Qualcomm this coming summer, the company announced during its keynote presentation at the Consumer Electronics Show Monday. The new processor, named the 800 series, “delivers 75 percent better performance” than its predecessor, the Snapdragon S4 Pro, while consuming less battery life.

The 800 series includes a quad-core Krait 400 CPU clocked at up to 2.3GHz per core alongside an Adreno 330 GPU. Qualcomm claims that the Adreno 330 has twice the “compute performance” of the Adreno 320, showing off its processing power during the presentation with a real-time render of a dragon blowing fire and stomping its feet.

The chip will include support for 4G LTE and 802.11ac as well as “Ultra HD” (née 4K) video resolutions of 4096×2304. The chip also has dual image signal processors that will support up to four cameras, 3D image capture, and photo-merging to create up to 55-megapixel images, if manufacturers can provide the hardware.

Qualcomm did not mention launch partners or provide a specific release date, but it said to expect the new processors to arrive “mid-2013.”

Casey Johnston
Casey Johnston is the former Culture Editor at Ars Technica, and now does the occasional freelance story. She graduated from Columbia University with a degree in Applied Physics. Twitter@caseyjohnston

Does this mean we're counting down the days till someone announces an 7" Ultra HD "phone"?

No, it means Apple will soon be downplaying higher resolution displays as completely unnecessary while touting such incredible new technologies as NFC and photo cubes. (not to be confused with photo spheres)

It's nice, but not a significant upgrade over the s4, and won't mean much to most smartphone users. I'm on my gs3 (s4 krait) all the time and have never felt the need for more horsepower, and my wife's n4 doesn't feel any faster, despite having even more horsepower than mine.

I suppose it's always good to have more horses under the hood, but I don't see this being revolutionary for consumers, just nerds and benchmark monkeys.

It's mentioned in the headline so it must be really important, but photo merging is a software feature, not a hardware feature, so it's complete fluff, unless I'm missing something.

It's not fluff. The time needed to merge photos in software and hardware is very big. I took some panorama photos using some Samsung phone with built-in panorama support and it took 1 sec tops, and when I use a number of panorama photo taking apps on Google Play, they all took about 60~100 secs to create comparable results.Of course now with OpenCL, they don't even need a dedicated hw to do it, but just use the GPU to do the magic. The article doesn't explain how it's done but I'll assume it means this chip can merge photos in the 1 sec range and not the 100 sec range.

How much memory bandwidth must this thing have to actually be able to push 3x as many pixels as the Retina iPads (which have an obscene amount of bandwidth by ARM standards)? I'd also be skeptical that the GPU could actually effectively drive a screen that dense when it's only twice as fast as the 320.

It's nice, but not a significant upgrade over the s4, and won't mean much to most smartphone users. I'm on my gs3 (s4 krait) all the time and have never felt the need for more horsepower, and my wife's n4 doesn't feel any faster, despite having even more horsepower than mine.

I suppose it's always good to have more horses under the hood, but I don't see this being revolutionary for consumers, just nerds and benchmark monkeys.

Games, the horsepower is for games, not for looking at calendars or websites, it's for more and better games. Games that you can play on your TV at 1080p and look good. All from your phone.

55MP images?! Fantastic! The problem is, consumers will have to spend at least $1000 for a mobile device with enough flash storage to accommodate those 55MP images! Whoever thought this was a good idea should be selling shoes for a living.

55MP images?! Fantastic! The problem is, consumers will have to spend at least $1000 for a mobile device with enough flash storage to accommodate those 55MP images! Whoever thought this was a good idea should be selling shoes for a living.

I'm hoping they're going to use it for supersampling a la Nokia Pureview^TM

IOW, the Snapdragon 800 it's a huge step up from the S4 that's in most LTE-enabled cell phones currently (2x CPU cores, 2x CPU freq, 4x GPU performance), but only a modest step up from the S4 Pro that's in some smartphones (namely the LG Optimus G and Nexus 4) (1.5x CPU freq, 2x GPU perf).

It's nice, but not a significant upgrade over the s4, and won't mean much to most smartphone users. I'm on my gs3 (s4 krait) all the time and have never felt the need for more horsepower, and my wife's n4 doesn't feel any faster, despite having even more horsepower than mine.

I suppose it's always good to have more horses under the hood, but I don't see this being revolutionary for consumers, just nerds and benchmark monkeys.

"SmartPhones" are actually just mini-tablet computers. This advance in processing power is another move towards the "phone" becoming just another portable computer. This is what MS is betting on which is why they are pushing W8 so much now. They know soon you will be able to do actual work on your "phone." You are thinking too short term.

Enough already with the forcing of 3D into everything - it is rare enough that it is done well by professionals, and you want me to believe that it should be in the hands of the consumer?

Forget 3D, many people can't take decent 2D photos. There are still vast swathes of people who don't understand the concept of focusing before taking a shot. >_<

I blame Instagram.

People take shitty shots then think: "Oh, I'll just run it through a filter and it will be awesome and artistic".

It then appears on Facebook, all their dumbass friends click on "like" and the uploader thinks he / she is a "photographer".

I don't know. People have been taking crappy pictures for a long time. The difference is now those pictures appear online rather than in the dusty photo album sitting on the shelf or in the plastic tub out in the garage. Well, that, and there are gazillions more pictures taken everyday, but we can thank digital storage for that.

If someone wants to take a 3D shot of their kitten, more power to 'em.

I would like to see smartphone manufacturers put a decent camera (sensor) on their device.

I'd like to see a smartphone manufacturer put a decent battery into their device. Motorola's MAXX line got it right. Sure, it might add a few mm to the thickness, but then you can use it non-stop for the entire day (and it's more comfortable to hold to boot).

As for cameras, Sony and Nokia seem to be doing interesting things in that area.

What would be revolutionary is some company develop and announce a smartphone improvement that actually provides far better reception than available now on all other phones! Better reception at lower power consumption! Now that would be a nice improvement.

All this other crap is nothing but that! What pisses me off is when I lose reception in middle of a call or it gets so were the other party says I am cutting in and out! Of course, nobody actually talks on a smartphone anymore. Communication is all via texting....

It's nice, but not a significant upgrade over the s4, and won't mean much to most smartphone users. I'm on my gs3 (s4 krait) all the time and have never felt the need for more horsepower, and my wife's n4 doesn't feel any faster, despite having even more horsepower than mine.

I suppose it's always good to have more horses under the hood, but I don't see this being revolutionary for consumers, just nerds and benchmark monkeys.

"SmartPhones" are actually just mini-tablet computers. This advance in processing power is another move towards the "phone" becoming just another portable computer. This is what MS is betting on which is why they are pushing W8 so much now. They know soon you will be able to do actual work on your "phone." You are thinking too short term.

Just plug it into a dock and have a full computer. Ubuntu's promise? WP8 turns into W8 upon connection. Or MS's next OS unifies both of them? 1920x1080 gets you there at a common resolution. Of course, WP8 doesn't support that.....

It's nice, but not a significant upgrade over the s4, and won't mean much to most smartphone users. I'm on my gs3 (s4 krait) all the time and have never felt the need for more horsepower, and my wife's n4 doesn't feel any faster, despite having even more horsepower than mine.

I suppose it's always good to have more horses under the hood, but I don't see this being revolutionary for consumers, just nerds and benchmark monkeys.

"SmartPhones" are actually just mini-tablet computers. This advance in processing power is another move towards the "phone" becoming just another portable computer. This is what MS is betting on which is why they are pushing W8 so much now. They know soon you will be able to do actual work on your "phone." You are thinking too short term.

Just plug it into a dock and have a full computer. Ubuntu's promise? WP8 turns into W8 upon connection. Or MS's next OS unifies both of them? 1920x1080 gets you there at a common resolution. Of course, WP8 doesn't support that.....

Isn't that what the Atrix promised? No one cared about it.

Convergence is a nice idea, but interoperability seems to be more important for the world you're imagining. I can start an email on my phone and pick it up on my computer. Or view google docs created on my PC from my phone. Android has its limitations, but also creates a world highly suited for a mobile device, and I wouldn't enjoy having it as my desktop environment.

W8 might have had lofty goals, but I spend 100% of my windows 8 time in a desktop environment. Full screen metro apps on my dual 23" workstation? No way.

The extra horsepower might further enable desktop android, but no one wants to use it. As for increased video game capabilities, okay, but it's only good for tech demos and games that 3% of the android population is going to play. Rovio makes money making angry birds games that work on 95% of the android handsets in existence, not 5%.

It's nice, but not a significant upgrade over the s4, and won't mean much to most smartphone users. I'm on my gs3 (s4 krait) all the time and have never felt the need for more horsepower, and my wife's n4 doesn't feel any faster, despite having even more horsepower than mine.

I suppose it's always good to have more horses under the hood, but I don't see this being revolutionary for consumers, just nerds and benchmark monkeys.

"SmartPhones" are actually just mini-tablet computers. This advance in processing power is another move towards the "phone" becoming just another portable computer. This is what MS is betting on which is why they are pushing W8 so much now. They know soon you will be able to do actual work on your "phone." You are thinking too short term.

Just plug it into a dock and have a full computer. Ubuntu's promise? WP8 turns into W8 upon connection. Or MS's next OS unifies both of them? 1920x1080 gets you there at a common resolution. Of course, WP8 doesn't support that.....

W8 is a stopgap release. It's true intent was to get Windows on smartphones, tablets, and desktops. that's why even though W8 came out for the desktop all the marketing was focused on the tablet and phone market. the next windows will unify the smartphone, tablet, desktop, and their video game console.

It's nice, but not a significant upgrade over the s4, and won't mean much to most smartphone users. I'm on my gs3 (s4 krait) all the time and have never felt the need for more horsepower, and my wife's n4 doesn't feel any faster, despite having even more horsepower than mine.

I suppose it's always good to have more horses under the hood, but I don't see this being revolutionary for consumers, just nerds and benchmark monkeys.

"SmartPhones" are actually just mini-tablet computers. This advance in processing power is another move towards the "phone" becoming just another portable computer. This is what MS is betting on which is why they are pushing W8 so much now. They know soon you will be able to do actual work on your "phone." You are thinking too short term.

Just plug it into a dock and have a full computer. Ubuntu's promise? WP8 turns into W8 upon connection. Or MS's next OS unifies both of them? 1920x1080 gets you there at a common resolution. Of course, WP8 doesn't support that.....

Isn't that what the Atrix promised? No one cared about it.

Convergence is a nice idea, but interoperability seems to be more important for the world you're imagining. I can start an email on my phone and pick it up on my computer. Or view google docs created on my PC from my phone. Android has its limitations, but also creates a world highly suited for a mobile device, and I wouldn't enjoy having it as my desktop environment.

W8 might have had lofty goals, but I spend 100% of my windows 8 time in a desktop environment. Full screen metro apps on my dual 23" workstation? No way.

The extra horsepower might further enable desktop android, but no one wants to use it. As for increased video game capabilities, okay, but it's only good for tech demos and games that 3% of the android population is going to play. Rovio makes money making angry birds games that work on 95% of the android handsets in existence, not 5%.

You are very shortsighted and ignoring the trends that are right in front of you. Fact is "smartphones" are getting more and more powerful. You can finally play real 3D accelerated games on them now. You have some office apps for them as well. Fact is the smartphone will become your all purpose computer and comms device. Business users are the driving force behind this and this will trickle down to the home user after the price drops just as in the past with most things like computers and cellphones. Cellphones used to only be for business people. as they became more affordable regular people started adopting them. The same is true of smartphones. what has the cellphone evolved into? Remember when everyone wanted the cellphone to be as small as possible? That has obviously changed. Cellphones have been evolving from a pure phone to tablet computers with cellphone capability. Cellphones will continue to become more powerful and more useful till they become the only computer you really need.

This is precisely why Microsoft came out with W8. They see the writing on the wall and have adjusted their plans accordingly. Expect Apple and Google to try and do the same but I don't see Google surviving this coming fight. I expect Apple and Windows to hold the dominant portable device OS's simply because moving both Windows and Apple desktop OS's to mobile devices gives their users access to the incredibly large software library already available. I don't see how Android will be able to compete. If it survives I see it in the same niche as Linux. The future, at lest for now, seems to belong to Apple and Windows.